From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Sun Aug 13 2000 - 16:59:10 MDT
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> Spike Jones wrote:
> >
> > Robert, I get the Darwin awards from various sources in my email,
> > [I didnt post these] but they always sound urban legendy. I havent
> > figured out how to verify, so I must treat them as fiction. The one
> > about the guy who tried to hang/shoot himself, missed, bullet cut
> > the rope, etc, now that just couldnt be true. Why do *I* always
> > end up being the nay-sayer? spike
>
> I second the nay-say on the multiple suicide, and also the bee-bombers.
> Stories with intricate dramatic irony are always suspect, with the
> classic (untrue) example being "The case was closed as a suicide".
I thought they were urban legends until one really happened on the lake
I lived on last year. During the winter, a guy was doing construction
work with a bulldozer at a house on one side of the lake, and in the
evening, would drive the bulldozer across the lake on the ice so he
could do some work at his house on the opposite shore. One monday, after
a rather warm weekend, he went to drive the dozer home, and went over an
area where there was apparently a spring in the lake bottom, cause the
ice was thinner, and the bulldozer sunk down 30 feet and the guy
drowned. When I heard about it on the radio, I was riding to work on the
bus, since my jeep was in the garage. I said to the driver,"Boy, that
guy has to be the biggest moron in the Upper Valley", at which point a
woman riding the bus piped up,"he was my brother-in-law, and he was NOT
retarded!". I replied,"Ma'am, I didn't say he was retarded, I said he
was a moron, there is a difference", and went back to reading my
newspaper.... ;)
-- TANSTAAFL Mike Lorrey "In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." --- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) "A person who wants a society that is both safe and free, wants what never has been, and what never will be." --- Thomas Jefferson "It's a Republic, if you can keep it..." --- Benjamin Franklin
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